I am not quiet current on what qualifies these days to obtain eternal life after death.

If you carbon footprint is part of the equation then my outlooks are pretty grim as I am about to schlep 14,44 KG of books half around the globe. A ridiculous ratio of them makes the trip not for the first time. The future self always has so much time. So much more than the version that actual lands with the plane and suitcases (full of books).

eBooks do not work. Hard to annotate. And -final reason- you can not read them like Napoleon:

He read books while ridding in front of his troops. When he was done with a page he ripped it out and handed it down to the next officer following him. Who then handed the page down to the next one when he was done reading it.

I have no idea where I picked this image up. The Internet and its search engines felt they should not help me with finding a source.

Upside is that it’ll last around 400 years or so. No joke. Some of the machines in my dads work shop are older than 120 years. I could not destroy them when I was young. That makes them very indestructible.

If I ever find that engineer that told the users that the way computers worked could be changed I’d kill him. He had it coming. He probably told those proto-users also that it would be complicated etc etc. But he had already lost them. All they remember is that they can change their mind. The how and why they don’t care about. “you can make that work, right”. No more planning. No more thought. Just charge ahead wherever your mind and dreams might guide you.

All goes to hell, since nobody thought about anything? No big deal. Can be changed. It’s easy, right?

Next profession I choose involves a chisel, a hammer and preferably rocks. Also handy to have something to throw on the floor at all times.

A new cable gets dropped into the atlantic to save 5ms on a 60ms delay. And High Frequency Trading will pay for that. You know that it really has taken off when they start considering a straight tunnel between London and New York. As impossible as it is, it WOULD save at least another 15-20 ms.

Currently facebook is down. Funny since Mr Zuckerberg just eclipsed Steve Jobs in terms of wealth. While it is gone I find the following thought amusing: What if this is it. They just close it, turn it off,
erase the hard drives and be done. That would be a pretty awesome exercise. The users certainly could not do anything about it. I don’t think they would have any rights on ‘their content or contacts’.

And imagine how quickly the economy would recover if more people would stark working again while being at work.

Facebook came eventually back. Facebook engineering posted what had happened. Reading the comments on that entry is quiet depressing. 99.9% have no clue what it takes to run a system that can deal with 80Gb/s of their ramblings. That seemingly does not stop hundreds of them them to still come up with comments on how to ‘improve’ things.

This summer the east coast, mostly New York, Boston and Florida will witness an invasion of Germans that might make people wonder who actually won the second world war. Germans are obsessed with effiency. And they have 6 weeks vacation a year. And they like to safe money. Well, that’s efficiency again. Right now they pay 65 Euro cents for each dollar. While making as much or more than their US colleagues. So everything is really really cheap for them in the US. Which is only a short flight away. Let’s say you are planning to get a MacBook Pro. You get that 732 dollars cheaper in the US than it would cost you in Germany. That pays for your airfaire. And so it does continue.

I think that there will a certain amount of trouble around this new wave of Aldi-Ami invasion. You see, many Germans are not so keen on the american way. Well. At least many of them are not. This has many complex reasons, and a couple of simple ones. As simple as having an Idiot President. Mrs Merkel for instance was a physicist by profession. Now stupid people exist in all countries alike. And your average obnoxious american tourist is probably as obnoxious as your average german obnoxious tourist. The difference is that American are blissfully unaware just why everybody seems to hate them. Germans expect that to be the case. Some might even consider this wave of lifted eyebrows that they face a part of their perks when they travel abroad.

In any respect it will not be fun, and I should try to get a dialect coach to get an italian accent or something, should I have to go to the east coast this summer.

Hard not to predict anything right now. Here what I think that will happen tomorrow. Is it actually tomorrow that Uncle Jobs comes down from the Mountain? Anyhow.

New Laptops: Third Generation for what is called the “ProLine” now. First was Titanium, second Aluminum (that stuff that bends when you look at it, keeps AppleCare so profitable). Now there will be a third one. It’s about time. The 12″ not making into into the brave new Intel feature left a gap in the revenue potential field for a suspicously long time. Not sure if the 17″ has such a bright future. Depends what how easy it is to squeeze out a new flavor of laptop.

There will be Blu-Ray. One could speculate that the MacPro bumps last week were announced after Warners killed HD-DVD. In other words: takes Blu-Ray now more Steve time, and the Pro upgrades fell of the key-note schedule because of that?

Those new laptops might have built in high speed internet connection. I would appreciate EVDO. It’s nice. And the Amazon showed that you can built it in, and that Sprint is willing to make deals. Imagine you buy a new laptop and get free non bullshit (t-online / starbucks I am looking at you) internet whereever you are. I use EVDO since roughly a year and it’s just great. Nothing short of that. Technically you get GPS with EVDO for free, I wish that Apples puts GPS where it should be: in every freaking machine. Yes, I like to Google for something and get results that are optimised for my current whereabouts. But GPS would
put the iPhone on the spot for not having it. Something to spin. (Apple likes has a pathological history of lying around battery life).

One could dream that Apple becomes an ISP. The iPhone worked great for them. But AT&T? They get their money, but nobody started to like AT&T. They are still considered the necessary evil. Who loves his ISP? Which ISP is known for being awesome? Nobody. Interesting. There is a market. People are not paying their landline or even cable bills anymore, but they keep their cellphones going, and probably also their Internet connections. That’s money that still is out there. And Apple is known to show a strong desire for that kind of thing. Sucessfully.

Speaking of Money, AAPL trades at 176. I think it will touch 190 after the keynote.

One of the reasons will be that there will be something that let’s people imagine that profits that used be over at Blockbuster Netflix will now also flow to Cupertino. iTunes is a money making machine.

The Laptop prices will look like the current ones. But by the time you have added the things you would like to have those new machines will be pretty expensive. I think a company that managed to get 1,000 US$ for each phone (!) they sell, is looking at money differently after that.

Finally there will be some iPhone news that will keep the sales going. Probably some (3rd party) Application(s) that can be downloaded. I doubt a hardware version 2 of the device. If so, then it would need to be in stores in a very few weeks, so that there would be no gap in the sales.

While the rest of the country sobbers up from the stupid real estate bubble fueled growth delusions, Apple will go on very strongly. So will Google btw. And not many more.

Over here everything is high tech. Pointless or not. Of course there are ads on the paper towels. Not real time printed blog content (yet). Missing urinal feature: real time analysis of blood alcohol. Bonus for womens restrooms: instant pregnancy test. Imagine the possibilities: Google could place ads for abortion options and/or pregnancy products on the paper towels. Right now health insurance companies could track your lifestyle a little bit via your credit card trace. Technically they could. Not sure if that is legal, and if they are smart enough to do so. But with personalised mini lab in every toilet you would get an interesting trace of activities. Of course lab technology does not follow the trend of hard drives of other micro electronics and computer related stuff. So this brave new world option will remain scifi for quiet some time. Possibly forever, since we just might run out of cheap energy -that is the basis for all of your lifestyle after all- before high tech might become that sophisticated.

Update:
Like with any sci-fi story there is a google angle popping up minutes after I ramble about it. Coincidency? Of course. Almost everything is. Actually. Get used to it.

rumor-3: [And I made this up]: Microsoft giving up and going open source. Nobody wanted to play with the gray elephant in the room that used to be a store.

back to 1&2: that could mean that google is the only remaining search engine. It was in a way anyway. But now it gets real tricky. Getting the enire email market could be quick second: Just funnel enough millions into the spam engine to keep the volume up, so that only people with very vast computing resources can survice in the email market. Already in todays brave new world Google could control vast amounts of spam: Just a slight tweak of a specific search quality parameter and somebody gets allot of money somewhere. Much of those funds would be reinvested in measures that come quiet expensive to counter for wannabe Google competitors.

So, you would think that calling something testDontShare would be kind of a strong hint what not to do with it. And of course, since I am typing this here, that’s exactly what happened. Funny, since I caught it before it really got shared. But should be a lesson for me: there will always be a bigger idiot. Always design things so that even the President of the USA could use it. I know, it’s hard. But that’s how foolproof things need to be.

If I would be in charge of tourism for a city I would spend as much money as possible to make the restrooms of the local airport as nice as possible. Sitting in a A330 waiting to take off to Amsterdam, the restroom is pretty much all I remember from Memphis. Those 15 minutes I had on the ground could have been better used to the advantage of the town.

Speaking of travel restrooms: On the first leg the flight attendants had put a bag of coffee on the coat hanger in the bath room. The smell of the room was better than usual. Funny how those bags are usually not more than 5 feet away from the bath room. But it took years before some smart flight attendant had that idea. It was probably that cute deadhead sitting one row behind me.

It really is old news
And nothing special. Just a guy. That got shot. 68 times.

But hey he allegdly had shot a police officer and a police dog.

Movies and realities blend into one for some people. Which is an academic excersice. As long you have the right skin color and social contacts and drug habits. Once you cross that line things don’t look pretty. Not at all.